


Trickster

by PurpleMoon3



Category: Thor (Movies), Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Buddy Villians, Knives are fun, OP Imp, Racism, Reincarnation, Scenes from a hat, Theft Therapy, but not the main characters, of a sort, people die
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-19 04:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8190845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PurpleMoon3/pseuds/PurpleMoon3
Summary: Aisha has a voice in her head.  He is surprisingly helpful.





	1. Dark Alleyways

Rubble dug into the skin of her palm as the side of her face throbbed. Blood dribbled from Aisha's mouth as she cowered on the ground, wincing with every thud of boot to flesh. Wet sounds, like cut off coughs, and loud, hissed inhale before a shout- “Nigga fuck killed Kenny! That bastard!”

It was enough for Aisha to peek her eyes open, one of which only opened a sliver as the tender, swelling flesh sent warning flashes of pain to her brain that cleared the fog of panic. Pops. They'd been coming back from picking up supplies at one of the newly established PRT/FEMA support stations, forced to detour as yet another chunk of building had come loose and caused their formerly navigable route to flood, and been stopped by Nazi Fuckers. One of which, Aisha saw, the one that had said Mr. Laborn could either hand over the supplies or hand over her, was still right where Pops had put him and wasn't moving. Kenny, apparently.

 _Impressive._ The word suddenly popped into her head, strange, when the word she would have said were her tongue not sticking to the roof of her mouth was _Kickass_.

Aisha spat, slowly stood, and huddled in on herself while her eyes darted from thug to thug to her father, on the ground and groaning. Too many of them, and they had weapons, one of them grinding the heel of a boot down on Pop's hand while plucking the brass knuckles from it. The smile had melted from the Nazi's face at his friend's shout, and now it was blank. Cold. “Shit, we were gonna just fuck you up, remind you of who we fucking are, but now... you get to be the example.”

_Monsters pretending..._

“...To be men.” The words to complete the thought fell from her lips, unbidden, and she shivered. No one turned to look at her, to tell her to shut up. Her father managed to catch the next foot coming for his chest, grabbed it, did some weird grappling flip thing and had the other man on the ground screaming. A swung length of re-bar battered Pops away, had him wheezing as bat was hefted.

“FUCK OFF!” Aisha jerked, stumbled forward, a hum of approval in her ears and she thought of her big brother. Stupid Brian. Stupid Brian and his big dumb complexes- but she remembered he came. She called and he came. He pulled the fuck off of her and- Aisha's feet slid into position. It was almost, _almost_ like there were hands guiding the movements of her limbs, a phantom hand of memory that copied the motion she's seen Brian and her Father practice so many times. Twisting with all her momentum, Aisha punched the man in the chest with all her strength like he was just another punching bag. A meat punching bag.

She danced away as he gasped, mouth gaping like a fish, falling to his knees as the bat he'd raised to strike at her father fell with a clatter of aluminum on concrete.

“Mike? What the hell, man?” One of the thugs called, confusion thick.

There was dark laughter in Aisha's ears.

 _Still_ , no one was looking at her. No. No. She leaned down, placed a hand on Pop's shoulder and while he moved at her touch he didn't turn. Didn't respond.

“Oh.”

No one was looking at her because no one could see her.

_They never do, child._

The words seemed sad, lost. Her head pulsed again, pain from being hit earlier or some weird power feedback she didn't know, and there was something cool and stiff against her palm. Laughter in her ears. Phantom fingers overlay her own, adjusting her grip.

_Your father will die, child._

“No.” She answered her power, pressed one nostril closed and snorted a glob of blood and boogers. “He won't. But someone will.”

The knife in hand reflected the faintest blue sheen as she moved, words of encouragement and approval drifting through her mind.


	2. Mirror, Mirror

Getting home was an adventure that revealed another aspect of her power, one that her power itself seemed surprised by. Her hands were tender and slick and supporting her dad when he was just shy of passing out and couldn't actually see her was... something.

She considered asking who Ford was, Aisha had certainly never heard of him, but that thought circled back around to her little power problem.

“Well, power, it's been more than four hours but it is kinda hard to ask a doctor when the doctor can't fucking see me!” She kicked the wall in frustration, then screamed at the hole her boots had managed to break in it. “God-dammit!”

There was a very noticeable huff in her ear, like her fourth grade teacher had just caught her texting under the desk again. _Calm thyself, girl. You, that is I, connected in response to extreme duress. Screaming and throwing a tantrum like a spoiled princess is not going to make everything better. Quite the opposite, really._

Aisha flexed her fingers, panting, and scooted out of the way when her door opened and dad peered inside. The absence of any recognition, any kind of acknowledgment in her existence was uncomfortably familiar on an unfamiliar face. It was her mother that ignored her _until she wanted to blame someone_ , her mother's boyfriends that _only wanted to use her, make her their own little harlot to sell. Leaving pills and powders scattered about like bait to reel in a fine fresh fish..._

“Fuck off.” Aisha growled. Maybe it was stupid to be arguing with her own self but, if she couldn't talk to her that part of her she would probably go crazy. Or do something really stupid. Aisha stomped out of her room and into the storage-turned-workout room. She faced the full length mirror and prepared to give her power a piece of her mind, full of words like fuck and bitch and poser, and a few other things she wasn't certain the pronunciation of but would give it a go when a blast of emotion nearly brought her to her knees. Aisha's eyes watered. Her still swollen lip trembled.

“You asshole-”

_I apologize._ The ghost embrace was back, but instead of guiding her motions to cut throats and pick out eyes like cherries it was just holding her. Long, lengthy arms wrapped around her shoulders leaving goosebumps raised on her own. _I... hmm. Would you believe me if I said it was an involuntary protocol to promote conflict in my host?_

“No.”

A ghost sigh tickled her ear. Was that the crux of her power? Was she a ghost?

_No. You are a child and I, well, all... parahumans? Yes. Have issues. I, that is you, have some as well. I should not have taken my rage on you. You have done nothing wrong._

Aisha plopped herself on the mat, still staring into the mirror. “I killed people.”

The words brushed through her, conviction and approval strong. A pointed chin sat on her head. _You have done nothing wrong._

“Then why can't Pops see me?” Her hands gripped her knees. “Why can't _anyone_ see me?! Don't you have an off switch?!”


	3. Ridiculousness

“Dammit, girl. Lead with your left! That stance will have you getting knocked on your ass faster than you can say poh-lease brutality.” Pops called, watching as Aisha corrected the positioning of her feet before resuming her attack on the hanging bag. Her tube top and cut offs had initially gotten several raised eyebrow twitches and a down turned mouth, but true to form the old man didn't say anything. He hardly ever said anything. Now, between the buzz of her power along her skin and trying to keep her form up to Pop's ridiculous standards -it wasn't like the damn bag was actually going to hit back!- his attention was more of a distraction than a help. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of her face and fell somewhere between her breasts.

With a mental exhale, the unsettling static running along her arms switched off. “This is stupid. If I fight someone, they aren't even gonna see my sweet ass coming.”

 _You may be possessed by a veil that would give even Karnilla herself pause, but no sorcery is infallible._ Aisha's power responded in a bored tone and a little _tsk_. Letting loose a quick curse, Aisha inhaled and flicked the metaphorical switch on her power to turn it on.

Halfway to the hall, carrying the wooden chair he'd been sitting on with him, her father blinked in remembrance at her existence. Her power was ridiculous. Mr. Laborn glanced at his watch, shook his head with a sigh, and called. “Aisha, girl, we done for today. Clean up, your brother-”

Exhale.

Aisha watched as Pops resumed his trek to the kitchen area. He slid the chair back into its spot by the little table before heading for the ice chest. Power was still spotty, especially when parahuman gang members that remained in Brockton would duke it out for territory and hamper the already slow repair process to a shit licking crawl. Despite having a small generator available, her dad refused to use it. Too much a flag for would be looters, and too costly to run on the gas they might need to trade if things got bad enough. At least, from what she'd heard and observed, the Empire was doing the absolute worst of all the gangs since Leviathan turned Kaiser into the smear in the iron suit.

 _Such is war_.

“This isn't a war.” Aisha padded into the bathroom and splashed her face with some of the water set aside for such. Swirled more around in her mouth before swallowing it. Clean up. Right. Brian. Sure. Like he would even remember with her power off. Spritzing herself with a bit of body splash, Aisha grinned into the mirror. The smile didn't quite reach her eyes. “This is the fucking Bay, son!  This is _life_.”

_Indeed._

Her power chuckled, a gleam finally sparking to match her stretched cheer. Aisha threaded her fingers together behind her back and stretched till the dull pop hit her ears along with the clink of silverware. Pops making a SPAM sandwich, probably. Her power was ridiculous, _but he was_ _ her _ _power_ . At first blush any power tester could take one look - _or not_ \- and declare her the motherfucking invisible woman, Stranger: Better Than You. However, if her ability was so simple it wouldn't have taken three days and nearly twice as many panic attacks to get it under control.

No, Aisha Laborn had the parahuman ability to make people _see_ her.

Her power was suspiciously silent on how that condition meant she was unknowable when she _wasn't_ using her power, but when pressed it gave the impression of embarrassment and something about Void Carps. Aisha dropped it. Powers didn't make sense. Powers didn't have to make sense. And she didn't want to be accused of being the next Glaistig Uaine telling people powers came from magic space whales or something.

The bathroom door shut behind her with a soft click, and Aisha shouldered her backpack. She slipped out the window and began climbing down the fire escape. A thought, her own thought, bubbled to the front of her mind and out her mouth. “We need a name.”

_...we?_

The response was so delayed, and so soft for a moment Aisha thought her power had simply left. She nodded. Her muscles were still warm from the work out and she began a cool down jog as her shoes hit cement. They needed to do some shopping. Normally they would be too expensive, but it wasn't like she would be paying for anything anyway, and the few shops reopening near the Boardwalk _the Brood Queen's territory; a worthy foe. Can she spy us through her drones? We should test-_

“Power, I am not picking a fight with big bro's main squeeze. You may be crazy. I am not. Name?”

Her power pouted at her. She could feel pursed lips and puppy eyes. Finally, it offered up: _Trickster._

The name was simple, elegant in a way, and it felt good. Impish. Someone who disappeared and reappeared and could steal the very heat from the sun. There was only one problem. While not usually something that came up -it wasn't like she was the only Aisha in the world- in this instance... Aisha sighed. It was a good name, too! Better than what she had been considering on her own. “Taken.”

An inarticulate scream ripped through her mind.  Her cheeks flushed with heat as rage boiled through her skin.

Aisha blacked out.


	4. Interlude 1

“Loki! Loki, NO!”

Thor's voice, but Odin's gaze. Wind whipped, stars shone, and Odin's eye was everything Loki did not want it to be. Curiosity and Calculation. A god judging his work and finding it to be faulty. Exhaustion lapped at Loki's heels, carded her fingers through his hair, and realization whispered the secret of nothing in his ear. He had stopped a war that would take hundreds, thousands of Aesir lives. It wasn't enough. _He_ wasn't enough.

He was _done_.

His fingers relaxed. The Allfather's disquieting gaze rapidly distorted in the distance. Loki disappeared into the infinite.

~\/*\/*\/~

The Void between Worlds was just that. Void of Light. Void of Sound. Void of Life. Almost void of life. Loki drifted, a frost-tinted body floating on spent inertia, thoughts as aimless as his existence. There was a strange peace in the Void, if little else.

He wore his magic like a second skin, surviving off the residual energy inherit in the very fabric of reality.

It wouldn't last. Upkeep of the physical form was too expensive in such an environment, but the alternative? An ember of selfishness struggled on in his breast.

_Thor could never pull it off. Odin, perhaps, Frigga if she had the mind to, but not Thor._

Loki's lips cracked as he smiled, sightless, and wove the seidr. It was a simple spell. A projection to separate mind and body and one he had used extensively in the past to scout and spy, only there was no warm bed for his physical form to wait within or brother to stand guard. Loki took up the weft of the weave and turned it back on itself, severing the link to his anchor, hastily braiding the frayed ends together in a holding pattern that would last... centuries.

He watched as once green eyes began to cloud over, a final puff of breath dying in the darkness.

~\/*\/*\/~

Loki, Silver-Tongue.

The words burst into being and vanishing like soap bubbles in the null-space. Did time pass if there was no way to measure it? No heartbeat to keep a rhythm, nor sun to shadows stretch.

Loki, Liar.

Pin-pricks of light in the distance staved off insanity; or had he already gone mad and was merely imagining the faint flicker of far-off worlds passing?

Loki, World-Serpent.

His spell warped and wove in circles; an ouroboros keeping his soul and mind intact through the black. He reflected, he burned, he cooled. Perhaps he should have let himself fall to true death. There was nothing in the Void.

Nothing stretched before him in an endless expanse, nibbling at his very soul. Small bites. Tiny bites. Endless entropy.

Loki, Prince of Two Realms. Ruler of None.

~\/*\/*\/~

There was no real direction in the Void, but Loki looked back. He felt them before he saw them. Two creatures, moving galaxies in their own right, breaking the silence like thunder. The entities spiraled through the emptiness, each a cacophony of color as they communicated in pulses that tossed restless spirits about like jetsam in the storm.

[DESTINATION]

They imposed physical lore with their weight of themselves. Gravity resumed its tenuous hold, dragging the speck that was Loki with spindly, thin fingers. What strength he might have had to resist had long since faded away, lost in the desperate and gradually failing effort to maintain his own self.

_Is this what hope feels like?_

[AGREEMENT]

They did not sense him distracted as they were. What God notices the ant riding the boot?

[TRAJECTORY]

A parasite: Loki fed. Small bites. Tiny bites. Bits were already shedding from the creatures. He drifted, a leaf on the wind, shaking off lethargy as a beast roused to the hunt. No, they were not shedding as much as they were _seeding_.

Floating, trapped in a seemingly random path bounced between fragment fields, Loki could not even try to avoid the collision of himself and a shard of Being. Loki's magic, the skeletal remains of his soul, tangled hopelessly in a lattice of crystal and energy. Eater became the eaten. Once embedded within the planetoid's faulty state became obvious.

The two creatures had limited, no, _damaged_ , their fragments before sending them out and now the simple intelligence guiding the broken bastion was trying desperately to fill the gaps left behind with _Loki_. It remembered being more. It _needed_ to be so again. The overriding command blasting as two entrapped beings continued in freefall.

[a.sim.lation]

Had he a visage worth manipulating, the fallen prince would have smiled. Transparent tendrils twisted, tearing through him, rooting around in his fracturing mind and drinking from the meager reserves of his power. Yet; the connection went both ways and _knowledge_ bleed back into Loki like an ever-eroding tide as he spun an offering out to the ebb.

[dIVerGeNc3]

Loki, Lie- _Smith_.

 


	5. Roll For Stealth

“Hey.” Aisha's power thrummed, along with the fading ache on the side of her head. Brick walls do that. She waved an ink-stained paper in the air and tried to look harmless. The burly man across the table gave her a slow blink, eyes traveling from her scarf-wrapped face down to her ice-crusted boots. Her power refused to talk about the latter.

“...yes, Miss?” The man said cautiously while sitting back. Around the room dockworkers slowed in their work -some were interviewing the destitute, others scribbling on maps, and yet others hauled around sandwich fixings- to glance at the shabbily dressed possible cape in their midst.

_Hmm. Perhaps if you had removed the price-tag along with the security device?_

Aisha wrapped the little plastic connector-thingy around her pointer and jerked it once, hard, severing the forgotten price tag from her new hoodie. She'd have to modify it to appropriate Aisha-levels of class, of course; coming too in a bed of frost after a power malfunction required some minor wardrobe changes if it happened again. And it would. Ice on top of stealth? Fuck yes. She smiled hard enough to get that eye-crinkle thing double M was known for.

“HI! Do you got one of the KNOW WHERE YOU ARE things for Trickster? That guy is, like, ess hominum biggus dickus, ya know?” Aisha asked. In her mind, her power bristled like a cat that had just found someone else in its sunbeam. 

Burly relaxed, marginally, and tapped his papers on the table to straighten them. “We haven't finalized Trickster's yet. There is some dispute on the exact borders between him, Merchants, and Hell-” 

The was cut off as one of interviewees listening in on the discussion shouted, “Bitch!” 

Burly sighed. “ _Hellhound_ . His known powers are also vague... are you planning to fight him?”

God-fuck it.

Aisha exhaled and slipped around the table as Burly shook off her presence and shouted, “Dammit, Ryan! Where are those ink cartridges you promised me?!”

_Thank you._

Her power's words were whisper quiet as she padded down the hall, dramatically dodging around men and women while singing the traditional spy theme. Her power chuckled. The tight wad of anger in the back of her mind loosened. She peered into the occasional occupied room till she found a balding man rifling through an oddly long filing cabinet. There was a brick of a radio at his waist talking at him. 

“ _...I'm just saying it's creepy, Dan. Sure he hasn't stopped us since that first time, but the guy is a walking cloud of darkness just staring at you. For hours. My cousin got caught inside that shit and claustrophobia doesn't begin to describe it._ ”

Dan grunted and pulled a folded -map?  _Map._ \- from the drawer. He laid it out on the desk and held the radio up, thumbing a button on the side. “Don't worry about him. As much as I dislike it, we paid the protection fee. When was the last time Merchants tried to steal any equipment? Think of him as an extremely intimidating security guy.”

Aisha laughed. It was the kind of laugh that started in the belly and burst out of the mouth like some kind of mad alien. Fucking Grue. 

“ _Hey, Danny-boy? Are you in a meeting or something? I can check in with Regina and get back to you later.”_

Paper crinkled as thin, translucent tissue paper overlaid the mat spread on the massive oak desk. Aisha choked off her laughter with a snapping of teeth, falling backward.

“No, actually. With Kurt taking over clean up at the Boardwalk I've been working in the office... why?”

“ _...huh. Thought I heard laughing. Guess it was from my end._ ”

“Anyway, I wanted to ask about the sewers in your area. I've been comparing the city maps and looking at old infrastructure in relation to what Leviathan revealed and I'm seeing discrepancies, even beyond usual paperwork snafus...”

Aisha backed out of the room. “Shit.”

**Author's Note:**

> I doubt I'd have the time to really flesh out an arc and plot and whatnot so here are some scenes from the verse where Aisha runs around with a voice in her head that is trying to teach her magic tricks.


End file.
